Last week I discussed spring cleaning your house. But what about your overflowing inbox, RSS reader and cluttered desktop? Our digital lives could use the same kind of spring cleanout as our physical homes.

I try to keep digital clutter under control all year long, but the first step is starting from a clean base. Here are some ways to give yourself a digital "information enema."

Get your email under control

Chances are this is where your biggest mess lies, which makes it a great place to start. My advice is to take the approach I take to my e-mail on an almost daily basis: Empty your inbox. Completely.

Take anything at all that's been languishing in your inbox and either deal with it, delete it or file it away. Once your inbox is clean, take a stab at organizing your folders. If you've got an archive, clean that out or consolidate it. I tend to keep things for awhile and hit that "Delete" button very liberally. I try to go through my archives on a regular basis and organize them so that my overall folder structure isn't too out of control.

Day to day email management can leave you with a lot of stuff hanging that you need to straighten out. For more on this see my guide to e-mail triage.

Weed those RSS feeds

I don't even use RSS anymore as I found it very distracting, but I'm as - if not more - informed than I ever was when I was sucking down hundreds of feeds. There's probably a larger story there, but I think there are lots of benefits to going through your feeds and trimming them to what you can easily manage.

You may even do like I do and rely on a few trusted sources to filter your information for you. Lifehacker could be one of those!

Organize your desktop

An organized digital life means a clean desktop. On my desktop, I have my internal hard drive, a shortcut to my external hard drive and two file folders, one for personal and one for Blue Flavor business. Basically I've got doorways into file trees and that's it.

Having said that, I know how easy it is to let things pile up on your desktop. You've got downloads, working files and more that just seem to end up there. If you let them they will pile up, just like papers on your real desktop. If your desktop is a mess, take some time to clean it off.

Organize, Archive and Delete

In addition to the mess on your desktop you may have a mess of files that need going through. This is a big problem for me. While I do keep my desktop pretty clean, if you were to take a look deeper, into my personal files for example, the picture isn't quite as pretty.

If you've got something similar I've got two words for you: "archive" and "delete". Go through your files and find those that you need to keep but may not need on a regular basis. Archive those. You may very well also have files that you'll never need again and have no business holding onto. Delete those.

While you're at it, take the time to sort and organize your archives. The cleaner your files and archives are, the easier it is to keep your desktop and files clean as the year goes on.

Make Backups and Do Maintenance

Once you've got everything organized, take some time to back up essential files and do any system maintenance. Run a defrag, update your operating system, uninstall unneeded programs, etc.